The Internet of Things That Go Bump in the Night

The IoT is invading Halloween with help from Texas Instrument's WiFi, ZigBee, and Bluetooth technologies.

My little brother Andrew is 13 years younger than me. I remember way back in the mists of time (1975 -- when the year 2000 was still a quarter of a century in the future) when Andrew was five years old and I was 18 and had just graduated from high school...

{Cue sound and "vision ripple" effectsas we travel back into the distant past}

...I'd always had a love of space and hoped to interest Andrew. I took a sheet of pressed board (hardboard in England), painted it black, and built a big control panel involving loads of switches and little 6V incandescent light bulbs with different colored plastic filters. I also installed a small reel-to-reel tape recorder with 1/4" tape upon which I had pre-recorded something like "Here we are in a rocket about to go to the moon. The pilot is Commander Andrew James Maxfield. He's about to press the buttons that start the launch sequence. 10... 9... 8... 7... 6... 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... LIFTOFF!!! Here we gooooooo..."

I installed the panel leaning against the wall behind the dining table, which we covered with a blanket. Then Andrew and I sat there in the gloom with him pressing switches up and down and corresponding lights turning on and off. Then we ran the tape and made appropriate sound effects to each other. Then we did it all again... and again... and again...

The reason I was reminded of all this is that I just received an email from the folks at Texas Instruments saying:

TI is taking advantage of its IoT technology to spook trick-or-treaters this year and we’ve captured it all on film. With Wi-Fi, ZigBee and Bluetooth wireless connectivity, any evil mastermind can control zombies, pumpkins, spiders and monsters to awaken when visitors approach. Watch TI’s spooky haunted house video to see how it works and check out the most recent blog post on ConnecTIng Wirelessly that dives into the technology behind the scenes.

Here's the video of which they speak:

The folks at TI go on to say that the Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to connect 50 billion devices by the next decade. And, to bring it all back home, they say that the IoT is invading Halloween with help from TI's WiFi, ZigBee, and Bluetooth technologies.

For myself, I'm thinking of the fun I could have had when I was a young lad if I'd had access to the sort of technology we have available to us today, such as all this cool stuff from TI. How about you? What sorts of goofy things did you create in the old days, and what sorts of things are you creating (or would be creating if you had the time) now?

While being at the high-school, I reconverted a technology class project consisting in a little sound generator into a electric "teaser". For doing that, I chained some transfomers to the sound output in order to rise the voltaje to a "shocking" level -- I already knew that the current decreased as I increased the voltaje, so it was not going to be harmful, but I really had tons of fun :-)

By the way... IoT world includes multiple spooky protocols --Zigbee, Wifi, Weightless, Bluetooth...-- and a plethora of different EMC and RF spectrum regulation that applies in each geographic zone. If you add a crowd of --patent-- trolls jumping around, IoT is pretty scary by its own!!!

I don't quite remember what kind of things I developed in that time period (which may be a good thing), but I have been wanting to develop a device that sets on the center console of a car that has control levers like an airplane, and has appropriate sound effects. This is one reason I'm digging into the Arduino. (Now if only my wife would go and make us independently wealthy so I can have more time for these little projects).